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The safest country in the world as far as computer virus infections are concerned is Australia, according to the February Intelligence report from Symantec’s MessageLabs.
Only 1 in 573.8 emails contained a virus in the land down under, compared to the UK’s 1 in 213.3, Canada’s 1 in 217.1, 1 in 203.6 in Germany, 1 in 424.5 for the USA, and 1 in 450.8 in Japan.
India is the most virus prevalent country with 1 in 197.4 of all emails being infected, an increase of 1.6 percent over the previous month.
The report also noted a 1.3% decline in spam activity from a spike of 79.5% at the beginning of the month, with the bulk of the February spam emails focusing on Valentine’s Day and the global financial melt-down.
Tugging at the heartstrings, Valentine’s Day spam accounted for 9% of all emails.
Not surprisingly, given the world economic chaos and with people expecting to receive emails from their banks, phishers have taken advantage of this, with phish attempts rising to 1 in 190.4 messages up from 1 in 396.2 in the previous month.
Most spam emails are coming from the world’s biggest botnet, the Cutwail (Pandex) steered nearly 90% of its February output, amounting to 7 billion a day around Valentine’s emails.
The report also noted that 26.1% of all February malware was of a new variety, and said that 941 websites were discovered each day to contain malware, adware and spyware, but that this was down by 22.1% from January’s figures.
Innocent internet users have to suffer span email nearly every second (one in 1.36), and globally, 1 in every 304.9 messages contained a virus, but both of these statistics were marginally down from January, 2009.
Phishing attacks rose the most during the month, with 1 in 190.4 emails containing some sort of phishing con, which was an increase from January’s 1 in 396.2.
France is the most spammed country in the world, with 74.6% of all emails being spam.
This compares with 57% in the US, Canadians suffer 52.6%, the British get 66.6% of all emails being spam, 69.1% in Germany, and Holland suffers 67.4%
Japan has a 65.6% spam ratio, China 67.8%, 68.5% in Australia and 67.8% in Hong Kong.
Industry-wise, the most spammed sector is education, which receives a spam rate of 67.9%, but this is nothing compared to the virus level in the Catering & Accommodation sector where one in 95.5 messages contained a virus.
The MessageLabs Intelligence report from Symantec is a highly respected resource for security analysis of emails, and its scanning of billions of emails each week gives the world a good picture on security issues throughout the world.
In a new move, Symantec enhanced its services to its customers with the launch of a new online storage facility which will be released at the end of March.
This is in addition to the 2 GB of web-based storage already offered to clients who have its $80 Norton 360 security suite.
Nearly one third of Norton 360 users already use the program’s automatic backup facility, but the new offering comes from Symantec’s $124 million takeover of SwapDrive Inc last year.
Pricing for the new Symantec facility is not yet known, but it will have to compete with Mozy’s $5 monthly unlimited storage product, and Carbonite’s similarly unlimited facility which costs $50 per annum.
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